What If Mitt Romney Were Jewish?

The Washington Post (WPO)’s Jason Horowitz
reported this month that officials on Mitt Romney’s campaign
don’t care much for journalistic explorations of their
candidate’s religious beliefs.

One spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, has been throwing brushback
pitches at reporters who write about Romney’s faith, asking if
they would write similar stories about Jews.

According to Horowitz, Saul objected to sentences in an
earlier Washington Post piece describing how Joseph Smith, the
founder of Mormonism, is said to have discovered the golden
plates that provided the theological underpinnings of his new
faith.

“Would you write this sentence in describing the Jewish
faith?” she asked, providing an example: “‘Jews believe their
prophet Moses was delivered tablets on a mountain top directly
from G-d after he appeared to him in a burning bush.’ Of course
not, yet you reference a similar story in Mormonism.”

There’s nothing wrong with Saul’s compressed description of
the moment Jews received God’s law, nor is there anything wrong
with the Post’s description of Mormonism’s founding in upstate
New York. But because I love Mad Libs as much as anyone, I
thought I would try a small experiment, substituting Jewish
concepts where appropriate in a recent New York Times (NYT)article
about Romney’s faith, to see if Saul’s argument makes sense.

An Experiment

Here’s one sentence: “Outside the spotlight, Mr. Romney can
be demonstrative about his faith: belting out hymns (‘What a
Friend We Have in Jesus’) while horseback riding, fasting on
designated days and finding a Mormon congregation to slip into
on Sundays, no matter where he is.”

And here’s a Mad Libs version: “Outside the spotlight, Mr.
Romney can be demonstrative about his faith: belting out hymns
(‘The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Such a Friend!’) while playing mahjong,
fasting on Yom Kippur (except for possibly some nuts around 4
p.m.) and finding a shul to slip into on Saturdays.”

Innocuous, right? (Please, horse-riding Jews, hold your
letters.) Saul’s complaint is also incorrect on the historical
merits: The only Jew to ever get close to the White House was
Senator Joseph Lieberman, who isn’t merely Jew-ish (as the
saying goes), but a full-blown Orthodox Jew. When he was picked
to be Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, the newspapers were filled
with tales of his religious practices.

A New York Times reporter, Laurie Goodstein, detailed
Lieberman’s exotic rites at length, in the manner of an
anthropologist explaining a previously unknown Amazon tribe:
“Many of Mr. Lieberman’s most basic religious rituals are
intimate acts,” the article said. At morning prayer, “the
senator lays on tefillin, the small leather boxes that contain
four biblical passages written on parchment, binding the boxes
to one arm and his forehead with leather straps.”

So what does the Romney camp find so frightening? In
talking to my Mormon friends (some of my best friends are
Mormons), the answer is clear. The practices and origin stories
of most religions, when viewed by outsiders, all seem fairly
strange. But Mormonism seems just a bit stranger than the rest.
The great fear is not that Americans will see a Mormon
politician as too sinister to lead the country (the way that
some Baptist leaders once saw the Catholic John F. Kennedy) but
that Americans will see a Mormon as too bizarre to be president.

They point to the issue of “sacred underwear,” the derisive
term for undergarments worn by some Mormons to remind themselves
of their religious responsibilities. Many find the concept odd,
but should they? Is Mormonism really that much stranger than
other religions?

Strangeness Factor

I vividly remember learning from a Catholic friend that,
each Sunday, his family would attend church to drink the blood
of Jesus and eat his body. Freaky. But is it any freakier than
the sight of a bunch of Jews gathering around an 8-day-old boy
to watch a man with a beard snip off the tip of the baby’s
penis, and then to eat blintzes afterward? Religious Jews, of
course, also wear a variation of “sacred underwear” -- zizit and
tallitot, traditional garments that date back thousands of
years, to the ancient Middle East.

The Mormon tradition dates back less than 200 years, to
Palmyra, New York. What Mormons suffer from more than any other
major religion is proximity. The foundation stories of Mormonism
took place in the age of skeptical journalism, and they took
place in the U.S. Most Christians believe in a Second Coming.
Mormons believe the Second Coming will be in Missouri. Many
Muslims believe that Muhammad ascended to heaven from Jerusalem
on a winged animal, which has the ring of something mystical and
transcendent. If Muhammad had departed for heaven from Tenafly,
New Jersey, well, that would open up Islam to some level of
derision.

Check that: It wouldn’t open up Islam to derision, because
some Muslims -- in particular a set of ill-tempered
fundamentalists among them -- have made it quite dangerous for
anyone to mock their religion. Not so with Mormons. This is
something else that causes suffering for the Latter-day Saints:
their ineffable niceness. If radical Mormons had initiated acts
of terrorism in Manhattan, do you think their religion would be
held up for mockery each night on Broadway?

Mormons’ equanimity in the face of derision is refreshing,
and speaks to the confidence they have in their religion. The
Romney camp should also have confidence, and understand that not
every reporter asking questions about their man’s religious
practices is trying to subvert Romney’s candidacy or his church.

(Jeffrey Goldberg is a Bloomberg View columnist and a
national correspondent for the Atlantic. The opinions expressed
are his own.)